Studies on Brazilians living in Britain show that, along with loneliness, unemployment and cost of living, the lack of proficiency in English is a key problem. However, there is little qualitative information about how the host language affects their daily lives. This interdisciplinary practice-based research asks how an art practice activated by experiences of displacement and dislocation in language can become a place of enunciation for decolonial selves. To this end, this research includes not only individual practices, but also collective activities carried out with a group of Brazilian women living in London, as a research focus. The endeavour to deal with English language has engendered writing processes in my visual work, which became a place for experimenting bilingual and fragmentary voices against the initial muteness in which I found myself on arrival in London. Using photography, printmaking, drawing, postcards, and artist’s books I have explored life-writing genres of diary, language memoir, and correspondence to raise an immigrant consciousness, explore accented voices and create practices for writing life individually and collectively. Assembling words and turning their meanings became strategies for expanding limited vocabularies. Once an impassable obstacle, the host language was transformed into a territory for exploring ways to know stories about language and write life narratives through art practice. This research is informed by humanist and feminist geographical approaches to space and place, postcolonial life writing, border thinking and a context of practice ranging from transnational art, accented cinema, visual poetry, conceptual art, and socially engaged art. It provides insights about English language in the lives of Brazilian women in London and offers a view on a practice in visual arts as place of enunciation for decolonial selves.

This research investigates photographic portraits that can be considered as potentially non-mimetic images. It uses the portrait of laughter in theory and in practice to explore a ́non-like ́, iconic relation between a photograph and its model. In opposition to portraying a specific laughing sitter, here the photograph is more informed by what the viewer brings to his or her subjective encounter with that photograph. Among other subjects, my research compares portraiture to clownish performance. Hence, the photographic portrait shifts register, becoming less a likeness of the sitter, rather a portrait of the viewer ́s process of interpretation. As an extension of our understanding of the genre portraiture, I am using and testing the German term 'Bildnis', trying to find a clearer understanding of portraits that are Non-Likenesses. My main case study looks at 19th-century photographs by the French physician Duchenne de Boulogne. Duchenne researched emotional expressions by capturing the moving face twice: with medical electrization and with photography. Based on muscular contraction, he also established a theory distinguishing 'true' from 'false' laughter. Starting by isolating one photograph from the context of Duchenne ́s medical work as a leitmotif for my studies, considering it as an image in its own right, my research raises questions regarding the relation between model and photographer in photographic portraiture. It investigates what is commonly thought to be the Photographic – the photograph ́s referential status as an index in opposition to the meaning arising from its surface. In re-considering Duchenne ́s photograph within photographic histories, theories of representation aesthetics, and in relation to other photographs, I aim to lift his image out of its strictly utilitarian context as a record of an experiment. Expanding the discussion on its genres and applications, this change of context opens up a new emphasis on content and encourages its interpretation as an imaginary photograph. This claims to be not just image-informed, but also informed about the nature of images in general and photography in particular. Methodologically, the first part consists of a visual investigation into the depictibility of 'unjoyful' laughter as a 'non-like' photographic image. The second part re-stages the play of questions and answers arising from the studio practice by re-contextualizing them within a specific theoretical and historical framework of portraiture. Ultimately being two separate practices, both parts inform and reflect upon each other in approach and subject matter, deepening and widening an understanding of the medium of photography as a multi-faceted research tool.

archives@tulane.edu / The stereoscopic 3D images of Puerto Rico produced and distributed between 1900-1910 by the Kansas-based photographic company Underwood & Underwood are notable visual documents of the first years of the American occupation of the archipelago. While these images rely on visual imperial discourses of 17th and 18th-Century travel books, sketches and paintings of the British West Indies, they reveal a shift in aesthetics and innovations in the representations of space, landscape, territory, and inhabitants. Understanding that Underwood & Underwood’s stereoviews of Puerto Rico operated as aesthetic objects and recognizing their cultural and historical specificity, I focus on how the company negotiated technological and artistic discourses of the time, endowing stereography a privileged space in the production of knowledge. I argue that Underwood & Underwood constructed a mode of vision which embodied progress and the modern scientific transformation of Puerto Rico’s natural world and people into available resources for the American empire. On the one hand, they marketed their products as “modern,” proclaiming not only new ways of seeing but also new ways of knowing. On the other hand, the tactile quality of the stereoscopic viewing experience opened the imaginative possibility of establishing virtual bodily presence in space—a specific quality of the medium that suggested to viewers that they were virtually inhabiting the scenes. Within the context of the nascent American empire, these images created an imagined sense of participation in America’s contested annexation: viewers of these Puerto Rican scenes act as both witnesses and supervisors in the process of colonization, and the stereoviews commodify the island’s people and nature even as they operate as commodities themselves. / 1 / Maria Alejandra Pautassi Restrepo

As a popular ‘scientific’ and educational journal, National Geographic, since its founding in 1888, has positioned itself as a voice of authority within mainstream American print media, offering what purports to be an unprejudiced ‘window onto the world’. Previous scholarship has been quick to call attention to the magazine’s participation in an imperialist representational regime. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Tamar Rothenberg and Linda Steet have all argued that National Geographic’s distinctive, quasi-anthropological outlook has established hierarchies of difference and rendered subjects into dehumanised objects, a spectacle of the unknown and exotic other. A more nuanced understanding can be reached by drawing upon Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’. Pratt defined the contact zone as ‘spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’. Photographs since National Geographic’s centenary edition in September 1988 have traced the beginnings of a different view of encounters within the United States-Brazil contact zone, driven by the forces of globalisation, which have resisted the processes of objectification, appropriation and stereotyping frequently associated with the rectangular yellow border. This is because they have provided evidence of a fluid and various population, which has selected and experimented with preferred elements of American and European dress, and used it to fashion their own, distinctly Brazilian identities. This thesis will examine both the visual and textual strategies that National Geographic and National Geographic Brasil (the Portuguese-language version of the magazine, established in Sao Paulo in May 2000) have used to fashion Brazil, but also the extent to which Brazilian subjects can be seen to have self-fashioned, through the strategic appropriation of clothing and ideas derived from an existing and dominant global culture. It will approach dress not simply as cloth but as a system of communication, whose many meanings are not fixed but continually informed and to an extent, even performed, by its visual, material, and textual representation. This thesis employs a multidisciplinary mode of analysis that draws on five Brazilian scholars, each of whom have used dress and fashion metaphors in their writings, which have encompassed poetry, film studies, poststructuralist theory, literary criticism and anthropology.

Between 1946 and 1948, American photographer Margaret Bourke-White traveled to India while on assignments for Life magazine. Since the late 1940s, a photograph from these assignments that depicts three men sitting in an ornately decorated room has appeared in several publications and exhibitions under variations of the title A Moneylender’s House (1947). Though Bourke-White is traditionally categorized as a documentary photojournalist, her photograph exhibits motifs similar to those seen in European Orientalist paintings from the nineteenth century. Considering recent scholarship that has expanded the temporal and geographical parameters of the Orientalist photography genre, this thesis analyzes the “documentary” photograph, A Moneylender’s House, in its varied exhibition and publication contexts to determine whether they present the photographic subjects from a “nonrepressive and nonmanipulative perspective” (one that Edward Said suggests might provide an “alternative” to Orientalism), or reinforce the “Self/Other” binary at the core of Orientalism.

This thesis will explore the causes and consequences of the absence of vernacular photography from museum collections. Through historical analysis of vernacular photography and a close interpretation of a contemporary family snapshot, I will argue that vernacular photographs are important objects of great cultural significance and poignant personal meaning. Photography has always defied categorization. It serves multiple functions and roles, is studied in a vast number of disciplines, and exists in a variety of institutions and collections. Furthermore, it is difficult to classify a single photograph. Vernacular photography thus poses a challenge to museum methods of sorting documents, artifacts, and art. Consequently the photographs that are most significant in everyday life are often missing from the museum setting or are misinterpreted and stripped of their meaning.

This thesis examines the work of ordained clergymen, of all denominations, who were active photographers between 1839 and the beginning of World War One: its primary aim is to investigate the extent to which a relationship existed between the religious culture of the individual clergyman and the nature of his photographic activities. Ministers of 'the Black Art' makes a significant intervention in the study of the history of photography by addressing a major weakness in existing work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the research draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources such as printed books, sermons, religious pamphlets, parish and missionary newsletters, manuscript diaries, correspondence, notebooks, biographies and works of church history, as well as visual materials including original glass plate negatives, paper prints and lantern slides held in archival collections, postcards, camera catalogues, photographic ephemera and photographically-illustrated books. Through close readings of both textual and visual sources, my thesis argues that factors such as religious denomination, theological opinion and cultural identity helped to influence not only the photographs taken by these clergymen, but also the way in which these photographs were created and used. Conversely, patterns also emerge that provide insights into how different clergymen integrated their photographic activities within their wider religious life and pastoral duties. The relationship between religious culture and photographic aesthetics explored in my thesis contributes to a number of key questions in Victorian Studies, including the tension between clergy and professional scientists as they struggled over claims to authority, participation in debates about rural traditions and church restoration, questions about moral truth and objectivity, as well as the distinctive experience and approaches of Roman Catholic clergy. The research thus demonstrates the range of applications of clerical photography and the extent to which religious factors were significant. Almost 200 clergymen-photographers have been identified during this research, and biographical data is provided in an appendix. Ministers of the Black Art aims at filling a gap in scholarship caused by the absence of any substantial interdisciplinary research connecting the fields of photohistory and religious studies. While a few individual clergymen-photographers have been the subject of academic research - perhaps excessively in the case of Charles Dodgson - no attempt has been made to analyse their activities comprehensively. This thesis is therefore unique in both its far-ranging scope and the fact that the researcher has a background rooted in both theological studies and the history of photography. Ecclesiastical historians are generally as unfamiliar with the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography as photohistorians are with theological nuances and the complex variations of Victorian religious beliefs and practices. This thesis attempts to bridge this gulf, making novel connections between hitherto disparate fields of study. By bringing these religious factors to the foreground, a more nuanced understanding of Victorian visual culture emerges; by taking an independent line away from both the canonical historiography of photography and more recent approaches that depict photography as a means of social control and surveillance, this research will stimulate further discussion about how photography operates on the boundaries between private and public, amateur and professional, material and spiritual.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:27:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Rafael Castanheira 1.pdf: 4927020 bytes, checksum: 974f39812f105ee892243cbf79db602a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-05-27 / This research aims at discussing the status of the contemporary documentary photography based on both a literature review and an analysis of five photographic series focused on Amazonian area. Those series were produced by three Brazilian photographers: Pedro Martinelli, Claudia Andujar and myself. We conclude that in contemporary photo documentaries a narrowing between reality and fiction can be noticed. The border between the impartial register of the facts and the fiction built over the real has become tenuous. Therefore different proposals of photo documentation have been developed based on the origins of its authors, their habitat, training, visuals references and the cultural practices of their time. / Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo principal discutir o estatuto da fotografia documental contemporânea, a partir de uma revisão bibliográfica sobre o tema e da análise de cinco séries fotográficas produzidas por Pedro Martinelli, Claudia Andujar e por este autor, tendo a região amazônica como foco. Concluímos que nos fotodocumentários contemporâneos percebe-se um estreitamento entre a realidade e a ficção, com a fronteira cada vez mais tênue entre o registro imparcial dos fatos e a ficção construída sobre o real. Dessa forma, surgem diferentes propostas de documentação fotográfica, cujos autores vão buscar desenvolver seus trabalhos com base em sua origem, seu meio, sua formação, suas referências visuais e nas práticas culturais do seu tempo.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.